Re: [patcg.github.io] Adding a clear incubation process and flow (#7)

FWIW, I do agree that it's not clear why an incubation group would have a separate incubation process.  However, I disagree about refusing to accept under the group's umbrella any work until it is proven to be entirely functional and agreeable to all involved; that's the end of the incubation stage, not the beginning.  This isn't a WG.   It's a CG, which effectively only ever CAN be an incubation venue for a WG.

 I want to be clear that we are not asking the PATCG to “adopt and support our solution now”; there is a lot of work to be done before anyone could claim (us included!) that they have confidence this is the right solution; we want PATCG to take responsibility for working on this use case, and we want to contribute this proposal to that shared effort.  

I have to disagree with Martin’s assertion (over in https://github.com/patcg/proposals/issues/4#issuecomment-1061281072) that personal repositories are a good place to continually refine proposals; beyond assembling an initial proposal, I believe this is an antipattern.  It is very important to us to do work together in public communities - not just “in the open,” but actively seeking others’ involvement and working together with other community members.  We are not big fans of a model that encourages any single vendor to go off and work largely on their own on a problem, refining a solution proposal until they think it is complete; in our experience, this tends to create tunnel vision, and makes it all too easy to simply work on a solution until our engineering team believes we're done, then ship it, after which time the community can either adopt it wholesale or not.  I hope we are all in agreement that this pattern is a Bad Thing™ for the Web, and that it is a much better pattern to work together in the community to solve problems.  (This is all aside from the value of getting CLA/IPR coverage at least committed to by contributors at a basic level.)

In short: I'm not sure what "adopted" means in a CG.  I think the PATCG should be adopting use cases, and taking on board proposals for how to address those use cases; that doesn't mean that it stamps "STANDARD" across those proposal, quite the contrary: such proposals should be clearly marked as not-a-standard.   Not-a-consensus, even.  But we should be working together to reach consensuses on some solutions, not ignoring proposals until an ideal one is offered.

I'm concerned by comparisons to WICG.  NOTHING in WICG is anything but an incubation, by definition; nothing there has proven broad support.  Nothing there is a "standard".  If something has reached the point of broad agreement, we (WICG co-chairs) try to move it out; to another CG with the right community for further incubation, or ideally to a WG that can turn it into a real standard.

The difference here is that WICG is not really a focused community - and we think this use case is clearly in the PATCG’s scope, and this is the right community to look at this problem.  It's clear from the comment thread over in https://github.com/patcg/meetings/issues/32, even, that there is broad interest in exploring this use case and attempting to solve this problem.  It's clear there are concerns over some details not being determined, and some of the issues being open - that's of course completely natural and expected, because there is still a lot of work to be done (and a lot of other community perspectives to be looked at, and it’s possible some might cause the CG to abandon this work.). That's all fine and normal.

If the PATCG decides not to accept proposals into their space in the near term, I would recommend to our team that we move proposals into the WICG instead (presuming that we pass the bar of "multiple entities are interested in exploring this proposal", which I think there is clear evidence of in case of Topics), and continue to work on it there with whatever part of the community wants to move there to participate.  If at some point in time the PATCG wants to take it up, great, we can transfer it (we do this in WICG often as well).  I see this as a significantly less attractive option, personally, as I believe this group is the right community to own this use case.




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Received on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 19:13:33 UTC